I hardly ever draw Tales of series characters but I really like Colette!

#tales of symphonia#fanart#digital

Sketch

A rough sketch of to figure out placement. At first I just had Colette by herself and had a hard time thinking of a background. For some inspiration I took a look at some of her Artes and decided to eventually go with Holy Judgment.

Lineart

Lineart is probably the most time consuming part of the whole art process for me! Even so, I do usually like how it turns out in the end. This is usually the time when I make adjustments and corrects in my art but I did very little of that this time around.

Base Colors

Laying out the base colors is a bit easier for me than lineart so this part of the process went by quite a bit quicker. I'm pretty satisfied with the colors I've picked although I may change the skin tone slightly. I'll save adjustments for after I do some shading and detailing to see how it turns out.

Shading

Shading is generally the most enjoyable part of the whole process for me! The hair in particular is what I usually spend a lot of time on, although I've spent a good portion of time and attention on the wings as well. The shading part is also when I feel the picture starts to come more alive. I also colored the lineart here and I think that works a lot better than the black lines from before.

Final Piece

Here, I added some color to Colette's skin tone. I also tried to make it look like the feathers and wings were giving off a soft glow and added the light streaks. Although I liked how the wings blended in in the previous WIP, the glowing effects didn't come out as nicely as they do in a dark background and were just generally hard to see with a light background.

EDIT:
The final piece looks pretty cool! I love the colors but I feel that you could still push the contrasts a little and really make it pop~

On a side now, a trick I do with glowing objects (which I actually just learned recently) is that you make the center brighter than the outer rim. I did this (http://arcwork.tumblr.com/post/143051354530/after-i-finished-the-chrome-doodle-i-got-inspired) recently and you can see my glowy bit on the lower left (I promise you no special effects were used) looks really glowy! Maybe that will help with the darker background (and it's still pretty glowy with my white bg). c: